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a community peak oil portal
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| Solar thermal projects gather steam -- and opposition |
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 Scores of grand-scale facilities are proposed for California. Their possible effect worries environmentalists and others.
Bakersfield -- Just up the road, past pump jacks bobbing in California's storied oil patch, look sharp and you'll catch a glimpse of the state's energy future.
Rows of gigantic mirrors covering an area bigger than two football fields have sprouted alongside almond groves near California 99. This is a power plant that uses the sun's heat to produce electricity for thousands of homes.
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| Iran's president concedes economy hurting over oil |
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 vox_mundi writes: TEHRAN, Iran – Iran's hard-line president has acknowledged publicly for the first time that his country's economy is taking a severe beating from tumbling oil prices, a damaging admission by a leader whose popularity is eroding ahead of a tough re-election battle next year.
Oil prices have plunged more than 60 percent since July as a faltering global economy dampens demand. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that will force the government of the world's fourth-largest oil exporter to make painful spending cuts, the official IRNA news agency reported Wednesday.
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| Methane even escapes from freezing permafrost |
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 vox_mundi writes: The annual freeze of wetland soils lying atop permafrost in many high arctic regions may trigger a long-noted yet mysterious rise of atmospheric methane concentrations over such areas each fall, a new study suggests.
The bacteria-aided decomposition of organic material in high-latitude wetlands in large part depends on soil being warm. During the summer, the breakdown process generates prodigious amounts of methane.
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| Oil and Economic Collapse - The Trillion Dollar per Year Question |
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 vox_mundi writes: By the time the dust settles and the numbers are collected for 2008, it will become crystal clear that a central reason we are at the point of economic collapse is our addiction to oil. In the first half of this year, while gasoline prices were soaring, the US economy lost $500 billion diverted to oil imports.
What does $500 billion really mean? That sum is as large as America’s basic defense budget and about 100 times the size of GM’s current assets? With $500 billion, Washington could purchase almost all property that slipped into foreclosure this year, or enough to make payments on all currently delinquent mortgages for the next 5 years? Many may quip, "But our economy is so big."
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| Climate change setback for acidified rivers |
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| vox_mundi writes: Climate change is hampering the long-term recovery of rivers from the effects of acid rain, with wet weather offsetting improvements, according to a new study by Cardiff University.
...Professor Steve Ormerod, who has led the project since it began in the early 1980s, said: "Since the 1970's, there have been huge efforts to clean-up sources of acid rain, and our research shows that rivers are heading in the right direction. However, our results support the theory that acid conditions during rainstorms kill sensitive animals. During recent wetter winters, upland streams have been acidified enough to cancel out up to 40 percent of the last 25 years' improvements: climatic effects have clearly worked against our best efforts."
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| Ralph Nader: We Need a Global Carbon Tax |
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| Graeme writes: If President Barack Obama wants to stop the descent toward dangerous global climate change, and avoid the trade anarchy that current approaches to this problem will invite, he should take Al Gore's proposal for a carbon tax and make it global. A tax on CO2 emissions -- not a cap-and-trade system -- offers the best prospect of meaningfully engaging China and the U.S., while avoiding the prospect of unhinged environmental protectionism.
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| Cheap oil: short-term good, long-term dangerous |
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| LONDON (Reuters) - Motorists must be glad the price of fuel is one thing they do not have to worry too much about as they face the worst recession since the 1930s, but cheap fuel is not good for anyone in the long run.
Global oil prices have collapsed since July, losing two thirds of their value from a peak of almost $150 a barrel and dragging fuel costs to their lowest levels for several years.
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| BP books supertanker for US Gulf storage - shippers |
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 DUBAI (Reuters) - Oil major BP has booked a supertanker capable of storing around 2 million barrels of crude at sea, becoming the latest firm to bet that it could get a higher price for holding onto oil rather than selling now.
BP's booking takes the total capacity booked for storage by oil firms and traders to at least 12 million barrels, nearly 15 percent of one day of world oil demand. In November, U.S. oil trader Koch and major Royal Dutch Shell booked vessels to store around 10 million barrels of crude.
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| 2008 WEO: Renewable Energy |
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| greg75 writes:
As I read through the 2008 International Energy Agency (IEA) World Energy Outlook, I had the distinct impression that I was reading contributions from people with completely opposite points of view. The pessimist warned that we are facing a supply crunch and much higher prices. The optimist in the report said that oil production won't peak before 2030.
This trend held in the section on renewable energy. The optimist noted that renewable energy is expected to "expand rapidly." The pessimist noted that biofuels are predicted to only supply 5% of our road transport fuel in 2030. And so the report goes, part rampant optimism and part rampant pessimism.
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| Why Algae Will Save Us from the Energy Crisis |
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| Forget wind power or solar power or all the other promising but frustratingly incremental solutions to America's energy crisis. The answer, instead, could be algae. It's plentiful and, like corn and soybeans, can be processed into oil and gas to power our facto-ries, cars, and airplanes. But unlike ethanol, oil made from algae won't compete with the food supply. And because algae can grow off a power plant's carbon emissions and greenhouse gases, it can help solve, rather than exacerbate, global warm-ing. According to some estimates, by dedicating just 2 per-cent of its land mass to algae production, America could meet all of its energy needs.
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| Soil Not Oil: Why We Need to Kick Petroleum Out of Our Farms |
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| Biodiverse farms offer us more food, better food, higher incomes for farmers and a defense from climate disasters.
The industrialized, globalized food system is based on oil. It is under threat because of the inevitability of "peak oil." It is also under threat because it is more vulnerable than traditional agriculture to climate change, to which it has contributed. Industrial agriculture is based on monocultures. Monocultures are highly vulnerable to changes in climate, and to diseases and pests.
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| Norway Can Boost Investment, Curb Declines with Greater E&P Focus |
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| Opening areas of the Norwegian continental shelf currently closed to oil and gas activities could increase investment by NOK 200-250 billion (US $28 billion) in 2022-40, according to a new KonKraft report.
Submitted today to petroleum and energy minister Terje Riis-Johansen, this study also finds that leaving such acreage closed would strengthen the fall in capital spending on the NCS. Investment could thereby decline to 20% of today's level after 2030.
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| Shell Goes for the Gold, Drills World's Deepest Offshore Wel |
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| Shell Oil Company has set a world water depth record in drilling and completing a subsea well 9,356 feet (1.77 miles) below the water's surface in the Silvertip Field at the Perdido Development project, approximately 200 miles from Houston in the Gulf of Mexico.
Russ Ford, Shell's technology vice president for the Americas said, "Pressing into ever deeper waters shows that the ultra deep is a new frontier for the critical resources to meet the world’s future energy needs. This
achievement represents a leap forward in applying sophisticated technologies in rugged sea floor terrain with a harsh environment of very high pressures accessible only by remotely operated vehicles. This means not just reaching a new milestone, but forging new ground in technological innovation."
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| South Africa: Business Signs Up to Efficient Energy Use |
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| Deputy President Baleka Mbete accepted a pledge yesterday by Business Unity SA (Busa) to increase energy efficiency in support of meeting national energy challenges.
"The reason for this summer energy efficiency campaign was to make sure that next year we do not experience power shortages as we did this year," Mbete said at the launch of an energy-saving campaign at the Presidential Guest House in Pretoria.
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| Nigeria: 30,000 Megawatts - 'Country Needs 10 Power Plants' |
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| Abuja — Director, Nigerian Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NNRA), Shamsudeen Elegba, has stated that Nigeria needs to build at least 10 nuclear power plants to generate 30,000 megawatts of electricity and suggested additional importation in order to meet the stated target. Elegba stated this when the House Committee on Petroleum Resources (Up Stream) came for an oversight function in the agency.
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